In this keynote, Zack Kass paints an optimistic vision of the AI revolution, arguing that artificial intelligence will catalyze a wave of scientific breakthroughs—including cures for cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and the realization of fusion power—within the next decade. He explains that AI will automate the bureaucratic and computational “cruft” that currently consumes much of workers’ time, leading to higher productivity, greater job satisfaction, and a shift toward the parts of work people love. Kass predicts a massive, rapid deflationary pressure that will dramatically lower the cost of goods and services, and he emphasizes that the resulting abundance of free time will force humanity to confront profound questions about purpose and identity. While acknowledging risks such as job and identity displacement, he frames the overall trajectory as a transformative, joyful shift for humanity.
Chapters
This is my favorite part, which is where I tell you how the AI revolution is going to improve our lives. And I talk about this in ways it will reduce suffering and increase joy. And I'm really excited for this because everyone in this room has a major role to play in the first one, which is I think that we are about to have a wave of scientific breakthroughs. I think it is basically certain that we will cure cancer and neurodegenerative diseases probably within the decade. We will almost certainly solve fusion within the decade, nanotechnology, quantum computing, diabetes. This is going to happen. And the most exciting thing about this is that each of these moments will represent a Wright brothers moment in AI, where people start looking to the stars. And in the same way that the Wright brothers flew a plane and then we went to the moon 60 years later, there's a non zero chance that these inventions give way to all sorts of new ideas and things that we aren't even considering today. Problems that we haven't even considered solving. The second is worker productivity and job satisfaction. I mentioned job displacement and identity displacement. Those are very real risks. But underneath that I think is something so exciting, which is that most of the computational cruft, the bullshit, the bureaucracy that fills our lives is about to go away. And people have been promising this for a long time, but I'm here to tell you it's actually happening now. And the really exciting thing is, and I know we're at a work conference, so I want to ask you to raise your hand. I've done the polling. Everyone in this room basically doesn't enjoy about 50% of their job. And it's true, basically across the board. You don't have to say anything. I get it, Wink, you know, and that's fine. That's actually a feature in some cases, not a bug. We've built these like really interesting, robust systems that don't fail. And especially with respect to energy, there's a bunch of bureaucracy that is designed to keep these systems online. And that's good. But so much of this can be done by machines. So much of this can be done in ways that doesn't actually tax us. And I think what's going to happen is we're all basically about to find a much more time in our day to do the parts of our job that we love and surrender that which we don't to technology. The third is deflation. We are going to have a massive deflationary event. There's just no other way to put it. I think everyone, except the central bank should be very excited. Monetary policy is going to be very complicated in the future, I'll tell you that right now. But the cost of goods and services is going to fall a lot. And we've seen it in various industries on a much slower timescale. Right. The phone in your pocket would have cost $10 million 20 years ago. Of course, today you go, yeah, well, when does the iPhone 19 come out? What's going on? Why is this thing so slow? We've become adjusted to the rate at which things get less expensive. That's about to happen at a really blistering pace. And the most exciting thing and the bet that I have basically made and the thing that I talk about more than anything is an abundance of time. I think that humans are about to rediscover what it means to be human in a very profound way as a result of the time we get back in our day. And this is gonna have some really interesting unintended consequences. And I think there is reason to be a little concerned about this because we don't necessarily spend our free time well today as is. But we are about to be asked the question, what do we want to do? And who do we want to be? In a pretty incredible way that most humans, basically, for all of the human experience, have never been asked.
